That was the understatement of all time.
“Hey, if you want, you can hang with me for a while,” he said, his face hopeful. “If you want to that is.”
“I don’t know, I was hoping to get the hell out of town before the Chinese soldiers get here.” I didn’t mention the looters in the red truck to him. “If they’re rounding up kids in the major cities, it’s only a matter of time before they start looking in the smaller towns and suburbs.”
“Okay, well at least come over until you decide what to do. Besides, it would make it a lot easier to get my stuff there if we use your car.”
“Alright then,” I replied. “Where’s your house?”
“Not my house, man. I’ve been living at Walt’s Diner ever since my parents ...” His voice hitched unexpectedly and he took a second to compose himself. “I’ve been living there the last few days. Best place in town to hang. It’s got a wood-fire grill that they used for cooking their burgers and steaks, so you don’t need electricity to cook.”
“Smart,” I nodded. “Sure, I’ll give you a lift, and maybe even stay a night.”
“Awesome, man,” Luke said. “Now, let’s get this stuff loaded.”
9
I didn’t just stay one night.
Truth is, I didn’t want to head out on my own and I’m pretty sure Luke didn’t want me to either. We spent the next few days in relative comfort, eating well and watching out for signs of the Chinese army in our area. After four days there had been no dramas, no sign of anyone in fact. It was as if we had the whole town to ourselves.
Luke and I became firm friends. He was a unique character, nerdy but knowledgeable in the ways of the world. While he was obviously a bit of a computer geek, his parents had clearly encouraged him to spend plenty of time outdoors. He knew a lot about everything to do with guns and military. Even history. One time I asked him why he thought the Chinese had done what they had.
“Lebensraum…”
“What?” I looked at him blankly.
“Lebensraum. It’s a German word. It means ‘living space.’ Hitler used it as an excuse for his invasion of other countries in Europe. It was to provide room for the ‘superior’ races to live as they expanded and took over the world.”
“Okay ...?” I frowned, not completely understanding. History had never been my strongest subject.
“Well, think about it,” he said, taking on the tone of a teacher. “China has a population of over 1.4 billion people in an area roughly the size of the U.S. That’s one billion more than us ... well ... one billion more than we had. And everyone knows that the world’s population was getting bigger every day. It was going to get pretty grim over the next fifty years. There would have been wars over food, and oil, and probably land.”
“Well, why us? Why not somewhere like Australia, which is nearly empty anyway?”
Luke shook his head.
“Isn’t it obvious? As much as I hate what they have done, it was a pretty masterful plan. Defeat your only rival superpower, take their land and resources. No one will try and stop you because everyone else is afraid the same thing will happen to them. And it’s all here for them once they clear away the dead. Homes, cities, transport. All they gotta do is move in ...”
“Do you think they meant to only kill the adults?”
“That I’m not sure of, but it does make sense if they wanted easy to manage, cost-free labor to help clean up the mess they made.”
That particular conversation left me a little depressed. It made a horrible kind of sense. Help was not coming. Would our allies risk their own people for what was left of America? I didn’t think so. We were on our own.
We spent much of those few days in the diner’s kitchen where the wood burning grill provided not only a place to cook, but also heat to stave off the cold Rhode Island winter. Although the temperature had climbed above freezing, allowing what remained of the snow to melt away, it had not cracked 40 degrees and was dropping well below freezing at night.
Luckily for us, old Walt had kept a good supply of firewood on hand. It was stacked beneath a tarp against the wall in the alley behind the diner. Not wanting to advertise our presence, I’d parked the car in that same alley, so on those few occasions that we did leave the diner, we always came and went by the back door.
Although we did talk about moving on, the warmth and safety of the diner meant we became a little complacent and the urgency to move on gradually faded.
On the morning of our fifth day together at the diner, I was out in the main dining room raiding the peppermint candies that sat next to the register while Luke slept in back. I was about to put one in my mouth when I glimpsed a flash of red from the corner of my eye.
Turning my head I saw a familiar red pickup truck cruising down Main Street past the diner. I ducked fast and crept to the window, watching as it pulled to a stop in front of the hardware store three doors down.
There were a bunch of scared looking kids in the back. I counted six, both boys and girls and none looked older than twelve. They sat quietly as the driver, the older teen from before, and his younger partner in crime got out. The looters both carried the same shotguns I had seen them with in the Fosters’ street.
There was no sign of the man I’d shot in the leg. Probably the sickness (or the bullet wound) had claimed him. The driver went to the back of the truck and lowered the tailgate. The kids cringed away from him.
“Hey, man, what’s up?” Luke called from behind me. I quickly turned and waved him to silence and beckoned him to the window. He was by my side in a flash and crouched down beside me.
“Those guys came through looting our neighborhood before I left my foster parents’ house,” I spoke quietly.
“No kidding, what happened?”
“I shot one of them and they took off,” I said, without taking my eyes off the pickup.
“You did what!?”
If I hadn’t been concentrating on the scene outside I might have smiled at his absolute surprise.
“I shot one. Well, it was kind of an accid…”
“You have a gun?”
“Yeah, it’s in the pocket on the front of my coat,” I said, glancing at him sheepishly. “Sorry, I was going to tell you but I forgot.”
He didn’t seem too fussed.
“Should we go get it?” he asked.
We watched as the older teen herded three of the kids from the back of the truck toward the hardware store. The kids went on ahead while he followed them with his shotgun at the ready. Obviously they were now using the kids to collect supplies faster.
The younger teen stayed with the three kids still in the back of the Toyota, resting against the dray with his shotgun between his legs as he lit a cigarette.
“I guess we better have it, just in case they try to get in here,” I replied. “You keep an eye out and I’ll go get it.”
He nodded and I crossed the dining room at a crouch, heading into the kitchen.
My stuff was piled in the corner by the door to the alley and I realized how foolish I had been to leave the revolver there. What if the looters had come here first? What if they had come through the back door while we were out front? It was a frightening idea. I didn’t want to end up as a slave to anybody, not the Chinese, and certainly not to a couple of goons with shotguns.
I had just pulled the revolver from the pocket of my coat when I heard a gunshot from out front. Even in a building and a hundred feet away, it was shockingly loud.
.38 in hand, I rushed back to the door into the dining area where I saw Luke flattened to the floor beneath the window. He waved for me to keep back and I stepped back into the darkened kitchen just as the younger of the shotgun-wielding looters sprinted by the diner’s front window.
I heard another shot. This one much louder and from the alley beside the restaurant. Luke crawled across the dining room floor to join me just inside the kitchen.
“The three kids that the younger guy was watching made a break for
it as soon as the others were in the hardware store,” Luke said, breathlessly. “They ran this way.”
“Come on,” I replied, pulling him back into the kitchen. “Grab a knife or something and we’ll watch the back door of this place in case he looks for them in here.”
Luke grabbed a wicked foot-long chef’s knife from the block at the food preparation counter and hurried over to the door where my stuff lay scattered. From there, he’d be hidden behind the door as it opened. I moved to squat behind the end of the grill where I had a clear view of both the back door and the door to the dining room. The revolver again seemed unnaturally heavy in my sweaty hand.
A full minute passed, then another. I was just starting to think that the danger had passed when the back door handle began to turn. Taking a deep breath, I pointed the revolver at the door and tried to decide if I should just shoot through it or not.
Luke raised a hand to stop me and quietly placed the knife on the linoleum floor. He stepped to the door and yanked it open to reveal a pale-faced girl, her blue eyes wide in surprise. Luke clapped a hand over her mouth and pulled her into the kitchen, grappling with her frantic wriggling as he shut and locked the door with his free hand.
I didn’t recognize her. She was a few years younger than us, probably 10 or 11. She was whimpering and struggling to escape Luke’s grip.
I put my gun on the counter and went across to them.
“It’s okay,” I said, my hands spread in what I hoped was a non-threatening manner. “We aren’t going to hurt you. But you have to be quiet or the boy that was chasing you might hear. Okay?”
She still looked frightened, but nodded.
“I’m going to take my hand away now,” said Luke calmly. “Don’t scream or he’ll find us.”
Luke took his hand away.
“Who are ...” she started to say, but was cut off by Luke’s hand again. He put a finger over his lips and shook his head before taking his hand away again.
“I think he’s in the alley,” Luke whispered as he leaned in close over us. We strained to hear what might be happening.
I heard it first, or at least I reacted to it first, looking up toward the ceiling and then back down at Luke. It was a distant rumble that was growing louder by the second. Soon the chop, chop, chop blades cutting through the air was unmistakable. A helicopter. Big by the sounds of it. The rumble closed overhead and grew until it made utensils and plates in the kitchen tremble.
There was a frightened shout from the alleyway.
“Sounds like he’s running,” I said.
Luke nodded, his eyes bright with excitement or fear. He looked at the girl.
“I’m Luke and this is Isaac,” he said quickly, answering the question he had silenced with his hand. “We need to move.”
“Come on, and stay down,” I said, and headed toward the dining room.
The younger of the two armed looters was crouched twenty feet away under a bus shelter. If he had heard us while he was in the alleyway, he didn’t show it, focused as he was on getting back to his pickup truck.
We cautiously made our way to the window and watched as he darted from under the cover of the shelter and sprinted for the truck. The driver was already herding the kids he had taken into the hardware store into the back of the truck.
“Hurry the hell up!” he yelled to his partner as he slammed the tailgate closed and ran to the driver’s door.
The kid barely managed to jump into the back of the truck before his partner started the truck and tore off down the street. The children in the back were huddling in fear while the armed kid leaned defiantly on the back of the cab and raised his middle finger in salute.
We couldn’t see the helicopter from our position, it was too high above the street, but the roar of the engine told us it was following them. Then the kid made a mistake. His last.
He raised his shotgun skyward.
“Don’t do it idiot!” rasped Luke.
He did. The shotgun kicked in his hand.
Somewhere overhead I heard a whining roar and willed the pickup to go faster.
Do you know how, in the movies, a line of machine gun fire will leave little pockmarks in the road as it creeps toward a target? That didn’t happen. Instead a section of road about two and half feet wide was pulverized to powder by the rapid fire ammunition that began to make a deadly beeline at the fleeing vehicle. It reached them in barely a second.
“No!” I screamed, thinking of the helpless kids as the truck was sawed in half by the withering fire. I lost sight of them in the flying debris and dust. That is something I am eternally thankful for.
My heartbeat thudded in my ears as we waited under the window. Would the chopper land and its occupants search the area? If so, we were toast. From the look that Luke gave me, I could tell he was thinking the same thing. Finally, after circling for what seemed like an hour but was, in fact, probably only five minutes, the chopper flew off. It was then I noticed the gentle sobbing between Luke and me.
I looked down at the girl, but left it to Luke to comfort her. I was too angry at the massacre I had just witnessed to do anything else.
I knew that the time had come to leave but after seeing the fate of the truck, I was not sure that driving was the best idea. I still had no idea where to go and neither did Luke, although somewhere during that few days we came to an unspoken agreement we would go together.
Surprisingly it was the girl who helped us come up with a destination.
10
Her name was Sarah and that afternoon, as we got over the shock of what we’d witnessed, she revealed that she and her friends had come from Providence. Barbara, an older girl, had been driving them north to some sort of refuge when the looters in the red truck had ambushed them a couple of miles outside of Fort Carter.
Sarah was obviously traumatized by her recent experiences, so getting information out of her was like pulling teeth, but, over the course of the next few hours, we managed to learn the important parts of her story. Sarah and her friends had been at a Bible School Christmas retreat which was supposed to last from the day after Christmas until New Year’s Eve.
The last time she had ever seen her parents was when they put her on the bus to be taken to the retreat. Speaking of them brought a fresh bout of tears, but she persevered with her story after some coaxing. The four adult camp counselors, some already coughing when they arrived, had all been sick by the time night fell and had left in a car to seek medical attention after serving dinner. They left the younger children in the care of Barbara, a 16-year old high school student who was counseling at the camp for the first time.
They didn’t come back. Phones didn’t work. A snowstorm hit.
“Barbara was so nice. Really smart too and she looked after us, but we were all freaking out. She kept telling us help would come but it never did.”
When New Year’s Day arrived with no contact from the outside world, the children had confronted Barbara. They knew she had been hiding the worst of what had happened from them, knew she had been watching the TV for updates when she could.
She didn’t deny it. She had kept silent while their whole world was swept away by the biological strike but when the airwaves went dead and it was clear that no one was coming, she told the children everything.
She had comforted them, letting them know God was still watching over them. I felt a bitter stab at that, but didn’t say anything, not wanting to upset Sarah any more than she was already.
It was Barbara who had found the message while cycling through the static of silent radio waves. She was looking for news or music or anything to prove that they weren’t alone.
On one particular frequency, the static would be interrupted by a series of beeps every hour and the beeping would last no more than three minutes at a time. A ten-year-old boy called Johnny said it sounded like Morse code. He said he had studied it in Scouts and tried writing out the message. It didn’t seem to make any sense. At least, not until Barbara realized th
at it was written backwards.
Sarah couldn’t remember the exact message, but she remembered enough for us to get excited. She remembered it was about a place, a safe haven in New Hampshire.
“It said something about going to the dragon too, but we couldn’t work out what that meant. Barbara was sure it was from the government or something,” Sarah said.
I saw doubt scrawled on Luke’s face but he kept his thoughts to himself.
We asked more questions. Barbara had been adamant that the safe haven was the answer to their prayers. Literally. To her, this Morse code message had seemed like a sign from God and she told the children as much. Sarah believed it fervently.
“We have to go there. All the children of America will be gathering there to stay safe and start over.”
I had never met Barbara, but I had to give it to her, she knew how to sell an idea. Turns out she had no clue where it actually was, but the plan had been to head to New Hampshire and worry about the rest later.
The day after the Morse code had been decoded Barbara had loaded the kids into the church bus and started the trek north to New Hampshire. They were just entering Fort Carter when the red Toyota had run them off the road and the looters had taken them prisoner. From Sarah’s memory that had been January 4th, the same day that I had ventured into town to find supplies and met Luke.
The looters had taken their captives to a trailer park where they had apparently made their base. Sarah wouldn’t tell us about what had happened while she was a prisoner, other than to say that the oldest looter had taken Barbara off to a separate trailer almost as soon as they had arrived. The kids had never seen her again.
Every day since, the looters had put them in the pickup and taken them on scavenger runs. I didn’t want to think about what had happened to Barbara. Was she still captive in one of the trailers? Or worse, dead? Sarah had no idea where the trailer park was but I didn’t think it would be too hard to find.
We listened to the last of her story.
They had been on a scavenger run that morning and the stop near Walt’s Diner had been the first of the day. While the younger looter had been busy smoking, his shotgun resting against his leg, Johnny, the same kid who had deciphered the Morse Code, had nodded to her and the seven-year old boy, Brent, to make a run for it. Johnny had been talking about escaping for days, but this was the first opportunity they’d had where they weren’t either bound or being watched over properly.
Fight Like Hell [America Falls Series | Books 1-6] Page 5